Yesterday, shortly after releasing an update from Thunderbolt for iMacs and MacBooks Pro, Apple launched a new Thunderbolt cable in its international Online Store. In parallel to this, PROMISE Technology placed the Pegasus R4 and R6 on the market, the first Thunderbolt RAID storage solutions with prices ranging from US $ 1,000 to US $ 2,000.
The staff of Macworld had access to a 12TB R6 model and compared it to a SmartStor DS4600 in RAID 5, connected both via FireWire 800 and via FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 (since the 3.0 is not available on any line of Macs).
The results, obviously, were surprising:
Compared to the FW800 interface, Thunderbolt was 6.8 to 11.5 times faster. Even in routine tasks, such as copying / moving files, she was able to complete the processes in about half the time.
Apple also published three new support documents related to the technology from yesterday to today:
Specifically, they confirm that Thunderbolt devices do not only support the Target Mode, but they can also be used as nice boot drives.
Update by Halex Pereira (s 20h30)
Taking advantage of the cue, iFixit staff disassembled one of Apple's Thunderbolt cables to check whether they contained a number of Cupertino Oompa-Loompas working to transfer data. What they found, however, was an absurd amount of chips (a dozen!) And other electronic components, all compacted in a tiny space:
Maybe that justifies the price of $ 50 for 2m of cable, right?
